Many people know about Sir Thomas Moore in the context of the play (and movie) A Man For All Seasons, which details the life (and death) of Moore, who was King Henry VIII’s Lord chancellor as well as his friend. Until he declined to publicly affirm the king’s papally unsanctioned divorce of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. After which, in due course, King Henry had Thomas Moor’s head chopped off.
But Moore also wrote a book, which he titled Utopia – meaning no place. This is worth recalling given the modern usage of the word, which most people take to mean an ideal place.
The juxtaposition is interesting given Moore’s Utopia was an authoritarian communist society in which no one owned anything and thus everyone was the slave of everyone else, which is what communism is in practice as opposed to theory. The theory – which is rarely subjected to scrutiny by communists – is that all property is owned in common. This is an absurdity. The same species of absurdity that says “the people” rule.
Which people, exactly?
And that gets at the truth of the thing.
There is a truism that the problem with all collectives is that someone has to run them. More finely, someone – perhaps a few someones – inevitably control it. There may be some sort of “democratic” method of selecting these controllers, as via a pubic vote. But no matter the outcome of the vote, it is a fact that only a portion of the voters voted for the controllers who were elected and the rest did not. This is important because even if it is 99 percent who voted for the controllers, 1 percent didn’t and that means “the people” is a lie.
It is some of the people.
It is usually far fewer than 99 percent of them. In an American presidential election, it is – roughly 26 percent of the roughly 50 percent of the people who actually vote.
So much for “the people.” And that is in a “democracy.”
In a communist utopia it is worse because the only thing you’re allowed to vote for is communism. More finely, this communist or that communist. But communism itself is never up for a vote.
The controllers always win.
Just as the controllers in a communist society also own not just everything but also everyone. This is the fact as opposed to the theory. The theory says property is owned by everyone. Absurd. “The people” own nothing. Including themselves, for it is absurd to speak of self-ownership when you are utterly controlled by other people.
“The people” are perhaps allowed use of things that the government – which is to say, the controllers – own. Because they control those things. For example, wherever they allow those under their control to live. They may live there as long as the controllers wish to allow it.
But “the people” do not own so much as a single piece of the linoleum on the kitchen floor.
On the other hand, the controllers effectively own everything – precisely because they control it. Stalin’s many houses – these were called dachas – were technically “Soviet state property.” But because Stalin controlled the government, they were effectively his property. “The people” did not get to use this property, notwithstanding the risible assertion that “the people” owned all of the property in the Soviet Union.
This is how it goes in the real utopias created by communists.
Moore’s utopia, on the other hand, was a place that didn’t exist because it could not exist. At least, not in the sense that communist societies exist. Moore’s utopia is the kind of place communists assert can exist and that communism’s useful idiots believe can exist but which never has and never will exist, because there can never be such as thing as common ownership of property and “equality” of condition. The majority can be rendered equally enslaved, impoverished, stifled and miserable. But there will always be the controllers – who enslave and impoverish and stifle and make miserable the majority while they themselves enjoy the things that most people in societies not yet beset by the cancer that is communism either actually do have or can have, if they have the willingness to work for it.
Because they are not enslaved, which means that when they work, they enjoy the rewards of that work – as opposed to being made to work so that what they work for can be taken away from them by the people who control things in a communist society. Which renders pointless the work. Which is why – in a communist system – “the people” are forced to work, often for those who don’t.
Which is a very good working definition of slavery.
Moore’s point in writng his book was to skotch the idea that the kind of utopia envisioned previously by Plato – and late by Marx and currently by the inheritors of Marx – could ever exist in fact and yet latter-day utopians continue to seek it. This suggests that either they do not really understand or that they really do understand – and hope the useful idiots never do.
Or at least, don’t – until it no longer matters whether they understand it.
. . .
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Superb article today, Eric.
“The theory – which is rarely subjected to scrutiny by communists – is that all property is owned in common”
The theory is very nice but will never work on earth where there is this thing called “competition for resources”. In heaven this theory will work. Heaven is a place where we will not be in want of anything. On earth however, we(humans) need to eat, get shelter and get clothed. Heaven on earth is a dream.
The reason Communism did not work in certain countries, so say the Communists is that these countries were poor and uneducated. Here in America Communism will finally work because here the people are rich and very educated.
I love watching glimpses of history through National Geographic or the History Channel. I find it fascinating seeing the old architecture and how these buildings were erected and have stood the test of time.
What I find equally as compelling is the psychological impact of how these men lived. Were they psychopaths and sociopaths? Absolutely. But, they also understood that they were mortal. Stalin weren’t allow area rugs because he wanted to be able to hear footsteps coming his way, the underground bunkers, soundproof walls, and bulletproof everything. I have no sympathy for evil, but imagine having to wake up and go to sleep everyday knowing many people want you dead, constantly listening for squeaks and creaks, acknowledging that a trip outside to your gardens could be your last. Also, not being able to trust those around you who are there to protect you and could turn on you at anytime. Most dictators are brought down from within. You can see how these men are paranoid and schizophrenic. Is the power and money worth it? To some it seems the answer is yes. There is no amount of money in the world that could get me to live like that and the head games that it imposes.
‘Which people [rule], exactly?’ — eric
An Irish MP offers a plausible hypothesis:
https://youtu.be/H21edCN3Q7c
You can bet the alien child murderers will be back next January, hat in hand,
askingordering the new Clowngress to cough up a fresh $50 billion to fund their genocidal spree.Not a single one will dare to take a principled stand as this Irish MP did. If JFK wrote his book today, it would have to be titled Profiles in Perfidy. 🙁
Lennin knew immediately that communism would fail on its own. No man will work for the benefit of others unless at the point of a gun. Lennin had to create a slave state to extract the labor via the Gulag system.
So how does the USA extract the human effort of its citizens? We store our human efforts in the form of monetary value. The state extracts it via taxes or else the threat is the same…violence and prison. It was sold to the public in 1913 in that income taxes would only be paid by the rich ($11MM or greater in today’s dollars). Sold as get something for free and the other guy pays for it… whomever that is.
Marxism.
[Sidebar: the Soviet people learned fast in that Lennin caused a famine, no one works hard to have it taken from you. Then there was a brief period after Lennin with Stalin allowed the people to retain more of their efforts until another purge started in the early 30’s. Rather than have their cattle taken from them, which is all they had of value, the Kulaks killed them to the tune of 30mm livestock. They rather starve than give the Marxist their plunder.]
“No man will work for the benefit of others unless at the point of a gun”
Man will work for the benefit of his immediate family (blood related) but yes he will not work for the benefit of others unless paid to do it. Communism will work but only in the immediate family but even there everyone is expected to pitch in with housework.
Goin’ deep this morning!
Ownership, or being a slave or not isn’t the ultimate problem. Ownership is the solution. If one doesn’t own anything, there’s no reason to want anything.
The promise of Communism is a return to the garden of Eden. No worries, no cares, just a static existence in harmony with God (or your fellow man). But note that only worked when there was only one man and one God. Once there was more than one human… well, you know the rest.
But who wants a static world? The Cubans and their 1950s cars. The Russian tube factories (please don’t piss on my point by turning this into a thread about how “superior” tubes are over transistors. They’re expensive crap. Get over it). Chinese copyright violation on an epic scale. Nothing new comes of Communism. Because no one gets to keep what they make. And when the 5 year plan calls for building, well, they didn’t say anything about quality, just quantity. The Russians kept QC high by threatening to run you off to the gulag. The Chinese are dealing with Tofu Dreg construction. How long will Xi put up with buildings tumbling because the party appointed construction company cut corners?
There’s the old tale of the space pen. The story goes that the astronauts used a pen that was engineered to work in the weightlessness of space. It took hundreds of man-hours to design and produce. Each pen cost millions of dollars. Meanwhile the cosmonauts used pencils. This was completely wrong but for a while it went around the Internet as a nice story about the foibles of government spending or the can-do attitude of the Soviets. Reality is that NASA used pencils and grease markers but found them to be a big problem because leads would break, becoming hazards in weightless environments. Fisher pen developed the space pen, using their own R&D and presented it to NASA at a cost of $2.39 each ($23.18 in 2023 inflated dollars). Not cheap, but still Fisher took on all the risk, there was no guarantee they’d succeed after all. In the end the Russians bought the space pens too. And Fisher made back their investment and much more by selling the pens as a useful tool on Earth with a built-in marketing campaign.
And of course, if you don’t own it, you’re not responsible when it goes kerflooey. The people who authorized and ran the Chernobyl plant only got 10 years for their negligence. But of course the thousands of people who lived in the area received no compensation for having to abandon their homes (some never left and seem to be still living to a ripe old age, but that’s for another time), and there were no civil lawsuits for damages. Meanwhile the lawyers and regulators had a field day with the aftermath of Three Mile Island unit TMI-2, even though there are no documented cases of ANY ill effects in the area after decades of study. This has effectively frozen nuclear power in the United States, bringing it under a Soviet style central plan. There are lots of good ideas for nuclear power plants, most of them designed in a way that they cannot melt down, but we’ll never know because the DOE says нет!
Remember all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. Eric Blair aka George Orwell
In some ways we are living under such a system today. As mentioned back in the 50’s that once the people that do all of the work and pay all the taxes realize it; what will happen next? They will either work less or stop entirely.
That’s already starting to become evident. There’s not much of a difference between retiring early or going Galt. I don’t mind working but not as a serf.
Indeed, Landru –
We discuss this pretty often lately. That is, bailing out to the deep country and living homestead-style and no longer being subject to taxes since we would stop working. But it’s a pretty utopian ideal, alas.